REUNIONS

Lily Tomlin Gives Us Some Details About Her New Comedy with Jane Fonda

Thirty-some years after Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly Parton joined forces to make their knockout comedy, Nine to Five, Tomlin and Fonda are re-uniting for a Netflix series called Grace and Frankie. Earlier this week, on a break from filming the new comedy, Tomlin phoned us to discuss an upcoming Epix documentary about the late great filmmaker Robert Altman—with whom she collaborated on Nashville, Short Cuts, The Player, and A Prairie Home Companion—which premieres August 6. But the Oscar-nominated actress and iconic comedienne also gave us a few details about her hotly anticipated new series.

Co-created by Friends mastermind Marta Kauffman, the comedy features Tomlin and Fonda as “two women whose husbands are lawyers and have been business partners for 40 years,” Tomlin told us. “The two girls don’t like each other, though.” Part of the reason for this? Because they are polar opposites on paper. “[Jane’s character] is very straight-laced, Republican, and conservative in her dress. She is married to Martin Sheen’s character.” Meanwhile, Tomlin’s character, who is married to Sam Waterston, “is very bohemian.”

The inciting incident for the series involves the foursome gathering at a restaurant one evening. “We go out to dinner thinking that our husbands are going to announce their retirement,” Tomlin explained. “And instead, they announce that for 20 years they’ve been having an affair. And because they can legally get married now, they want to divorce us and get married.”

The two women—now permanently entwined in each other’s lives—realize that, for better or worse, they have more in common with each other than they originally thought.

The reunion comes a few decades after speculation that Tomlin and Fonda would re-unite (along with Dolly Parton) for a Nine to Five follow-up. Alas, as Tomlin explained in another interview, “[F]or years, we tried to make a sequel, but it just never worked out. There were several scripts, but after [Nine to Five director] Colin [Higgins] died, we sort of gave up on that. Which is a shame. I wish we’d done it, if only just for the sake of doing it.”

Fortunately, the duo were given another juicy project on which to cooperate. Tomlin said that talks between herself, Fonda, and the series creators began last year. Coincidentally, Netflix happened to be interested in getting into single-camera comedy and snapped up the series so that the belated Tomlin-Fonda reunion could finally be realized.

One boldfaced name will be dearly missed when Grace and Frankie premieres next year though: Dolly Parton. Asked whether the third Nine to Five musketeer might make a guest appearance on the series, Tomlin seemed open to the thought. “Dolly,” Tomlin sighed. “Yes, we need our Dolly. She might [show up], who knows.”